The Earthquake

PREFACE

by Tahir Wattar

I will not introduce myself as much as I will my work, a product of various cultural factors. I am merely one among one hundred million Arabs. There is no special value to my existence as a man struggling between two different mentalities; the first, medieval, general and abstract; the second, twenty-first century, scientific and technological.

As I’ve stated, my work is the product of a cultural dynamic within a certain area of the Arab world which has been, to some degree or another, exposed to the winds of an era which at times carried the seeds of life and, at other times, took those seeds away and replaced them with the seeds of death. I shall not expound.

The Earthquake is a novel from Algeria. The Arab reader may know much about Algeria during the time of colonial rule and its struggle for liberation. Algeria is a geography in every sense of the word. But does the reader know anything about Algeria after it won its independence?

In the aftermath of a century and a half of colonial rule, Algeria had to start from scratch. The policeman is new, as is the civil servant, the governor and the merchant. In fact both life and death are new. They are all part of a new entity which grew out of another entity, and then embarked upon establishing new structures and components of its identity.

In the end I may very well convince the educated Arab of the East that there exists in Algeria a literature in the Arabic language. If his or her knowledge is restricted to Kateb Yacine and Malek Haddad, then this means that this knowledge is not very profound. Writers such as those are like hard currency, easily accessible throughout the world. Or it may mean that this restricted knowledge does an injustice to colleagues who try to contribute to enriching Arabic literature, or even to an entire people who struggle to reclaim one of the basic fundamentals of its identity, an identity that was and still is a target of colonial and imperial aggression. But above all, it does an injustice to the educated Arab, as an intellectual, by not bothering to reach out and look beyond the names of those who came into view by way of translation.

I would like to conclude by saying that socialist literature and the socialist hero in Algeria were given birth, as was cleverly pointed out by the late Jean Senac, only in literature written in Arabic. As one who writes in Arabic, I take great pride and joy in that.

INTRODUCTION

by William Granara

‘I am a sick man ... I am a spiteful man. I am an unattractive man.’

Notes from Underground

This opening line of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s 1864 novella in which the nameless hero introduces himself to the reader could just as accurately introduce Sheikh Abdelmajid Boularwah, the lone main character of Tahir Wattar’s novel The Earthquake (al-Zilzal). Both characters are subjects of psychological narratives which tell the story, in painful detail, of the inner turmoil of living on the edges of history and humanity.

It is Sheikh Abdelmajid Boularwah who gives this work its form and substance. His grotesque physique, his wobbling, rotund body sweating profusely in the murderous Constantine sun and his spiteful, cantankerous and conniving personality mould a most interesting and complex literary figure. Readers of Western literature may find in The Earthquake similarities with Rabelais’ (d. 1553) Pantagruel, his literary construction through which he sought to satirise the religious, cultural and legal institutions of sixteenth-century France. One is also reminded of Alfred Jarry’s (d. 1907) Ubu Roi, the central character in a theatrical trilogy, whose grotesque body, repulsive manners and vulgar speech were created to assault the artistic and ethical sensibilities of bourgeois French society and whose opening night in 1896 sent shock waves throughout even the most libertine of Parisian theatrical circles.

In the same vein, Sheikh Abdelmajid Boularwah is a shocking character. In fact, he is more than a man in physical, mental and spiritual decline: pathetic like the nameless narrator of Notes from Underground, and spiralling out of existence like Jean-Baptiste Clamence, the narrator of Albert Camus’ novel La chute (The Fall, 1956), Sheikh Abdelmajid Boularwah is truly evil, a character completely devoid of any saving grace.

Ironically, the reader of modern Arabic fiction may find Sheikh Abdelmajid Boularwah more difficult to place. He or she may see him as somewhat of a surprise, if not an anomaly. It is indeed rare to find in modern Arabic literature an unequivocally evil character as a central figure. Certainly, there are all kinds of villains and antagonists: swindlers, profligates, traitors and collaborators, killers, drug addicts, deserters and social outcasts. The difference is that these characters are cast in the margins of both the narrative and social discourse. They are constructed to serve as victims of society’s ills, as symbols of religious, social and political aberrations. They are the constructs of a particular kind of didacticism that underlines the social and ethical dimensions of modern Arabic literature. In the end, one way or another, they reintegrate into society or they fade away into literary condemnation.

The modern Algerian novel made its first appearance in the French language in the 1950s, at the time when Algerians were engaged in a struggle for national liberation from a century of French colonial rule that began with France’s conquest of Algeria in 1830.* Their war for independence, which Algerians call ‘The War of a Million Martyrs’, began in 1954 and ended with independence in 1962. Naturally, this long, hard-fought struggle figures prominently in the shaping of this new novel. As Aida Bamia observes, ‘This burning desire to reveal their existence and their true nature to the world characterised the beginning of a national Algerian literature.’† This new-born novel, written in the language of the colonist, and being the only language available to many of its writers, confronted the enemy in their own idiom and, at the same time, sought to articulate an Algerian national consciousness and identity.‡ Most important, this first-generation Algerian novel brought attention to the misery of both urban and rural poverty, as well as the social injustice suffered by the indigenous population at the hands of the colonial government and the communities of privileged European settlers.

The first Arabic-language novels in Algeria, by contrast, come almost a decade after independence. The events of the long and bitter struggle and the bitter memories of it provide both the context and the inspiration for these first Arabic novels.* The political, social and religious disputes that formulated the modern Algerian national discourse, and which were set aside in common cause in the struggle against French occupation, resurfaced in this new Arabic fiction in its various characters, plots, settings and points of view. In a very real sense, the Arabic Algerian novel is a post-colonial novel.

Tahir Wattar is a pioneer of the Arabic novel in Algeria. He was born in eastern Algeria in 1936, received a traditional (religious) education in Algeria and studied at the prestigious al-Zaytouna University in Tunisia where he lived during most of the war of independence. After his return to Algeria he wrote for literary journals before launching his own career as a writer. He has written plays and collections of short stories but is most widely known for his novels. Wattar’s first novel al-Laz (The Ace), written between 1965 and 1972 and published in 1974, and its sequel, al-Laz: al-’ishq wa al-mawt fi al-zaman al-harashi (al-Laz: Love and Death in Terrible Times), published in 1982, are prime examples of this Algerian Arabic independence literature.*

His second novel, al-Zilzal (The Earthquake), was also published in 1974. If al-Laz is to be considered his ‘classic’ novel of the Algerian struggle for independence, then The Earthquake is Wattar’s ‘classic’ postcolonial novel. In it there is much that draws upon both Western and Arabo-Islamic literary traditions and themes (which will be discussed in some detail below), a key factor that distinguishes the Arabic novel in Algeria from its French counterpart. Beyond the mere difference of language, the Arabic novel delves into a history, religion and mentality that most Algerians share with a huge number of Muslims and Arabs, past and present, in ways that the French novel of Algeria failed – or chose not – to do.

Reading Tahir Wattar’s The Earthquake is a challenging enterprise. In no way could it serve as an easy ‘entry’ into modern Arabic – or even Algerian – literature. In addition to its cultural complexity, there is the stark, consciously unaesthetic, black-and-white prose, the sudden and frequently shifting stream(s) of consciousness from the third-person narrative to first-person monologues, interspersed with dialogues that take place in both the present and the past, all the classic literary devices of the modern novel that challenge the reader to interpret its meanings. The embedding of stories within stories, evocative of the narrative technique of A Thousand and One Nights, has at times a dizzying effect. The bleak descriptions of strewn garbage, the stench of human filth, images of urban poverty and suffering and recollections of heinous crimes against the innocent, force the reader to share in the experience of Wattar’s disturbing visions of an imaginary universe, of a society going wrong.

The basic structure of the novel is the journey (rihla), a popular subgenre in Arabic literature in all its phases. Sheikh Abdelmajid Boularwah sets out from the capital, Algiers, and drives nine hours to Constantine (the site of an actual earthquake in 1947) in search of relatives in whose names he intends to register his land in an attempt to prevent the government from nationalising his property. Thus the plot follows faithfully the historical reality of agrarian reform which was one of the cornerstones of the post-independence restructuring of the 1970s. The novel begins with his arrival in Constantine, and all of its events take place, reminiscent of Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), in one long, tortuous afternoon. His quest to deceive the government in its campaign to launch a programme of agrarian reform leads Boularwah through a labyrinth of back alleys and past memories. In the process he becomes the consummate rogue, the deceitful trickster whose chaotic adventures and reminiscences, both real and imaginary, derail this journey into the picaresque. As he traverses the city of Constantine, precariously perched high on a rock, and makes his way across its seven bridges, he battles the forces of a rapidly changing society while confronting the demons of his past. The sequence of his recollections constructs an autobiographical narrative whose subject, a defiantly proud scion of a family of ruthless, rural landowners, swindlers, traitors and collaborators with the colonial authorities, tells his story of modern Algeria from a consistently adversarial and surrealistically twisted point of view.

The young Abdelmajid Boularwah’s journey to Tunisia to receive an ‘Islamic’ education and his return to Algeria as a man of religion and learning provide the sharp ironic tone of the novel. It is also in keeping with a traditional motif of the satire of religion endemic to the picturesque’.* His vocation as a traditionally educated headmaster of a high school associates him with the class of Muslim clerics, often the subjects of lampoons in modern Arabic literature. Throughout the Arab – and Muslim – world, much of twentieth-century culture and politics has centred around debates pitting tradition against modernity, East against West, religious against secular and faith against science and technology. It was the cleric, clothed in medieval robe and turban, defender of the rich and exploiter of the poor, collaborator, government informant, anti-progressive, hypocrite and sinner, who stood for all that was wrong and all that was in need of change. Wattar’s The Earthquake follows in this tradition.

As a ‘man of the cloth’, Sheikh Abdelmajid Boularwah may be read as the subject of the classic mock-heroic parody in whose composition the exemplarity of the ideal imam or sheikh – the Prophet Muhammad – is implied. Both the historical and literary (textual and popular) figure of the Prophet, and, by extension, the ideal imam, is just, caring, selfless, temperate in his bodily appetites, nurturing, inclusive, tender and affectionate with women and generous and gentle to the poor and weak. Sheikh Abdelmajid Boularwah is none of the above. In fact, his persona is a composite of all of the opposite attributes. He is the anti-Muslim hero in Wattar’s anti-roman.

The euphoria of victory in post-colonial, independent Algeria was short-lived. No sooner had the armistice been signed and a new republic declared than old rifts and rivalries resurfaced. Scores had to be settled, collaborators punished, and Algeria witnessed a massive exodus of many of its citizens, draining the country of much of its expertise. The economy suffered, there was mass dislocation, particularly from rural to urban centres and the population exploded. It is in the context of these problems and the new government’s socialist revolution, its ambitious agrarian reform, its large-scale industrialisation, its goals of Algerianising a new, massive state apparatus and Arabising culture and education, that the text of The Earthquake is best understood.* Wattar’s vision of post-colonial Algeria is of a society in chaos, a ‘world upside down’, and to give literary expression to this vision he taps into the rich corpus of Islamic eschatological imagery and apocalyptic legends and reworks their symbols of inversion to reinforce the ironic mode of the novel.

It is the Qur’an and, more often, the hadith, the corpus of sayings and actions of the Prophet Muhammad, that provide the bases for Islamic apocalyptic legends. The title of the novel is taken from the title of Chapter 99 of the Qur’an which foretells the Day of Judgement. The first two verses of Chapter 22 (The Pilgrimage), ‘Every suckling female will forget her suckling, and every pregnant female will discharge her burden and you will see men drunk, yet it will not be in intoxication’, which offer a glimpse of the state of the world at the end of time, constitute a kind of mantra which Sheikh Boularwah chants in his wanderings throughout Constantine as he, in his self-appointed role as harbinger of doom, tries to prevent the new government and its supporters nationalising his extensive property. Images of the apocalypse, fire and smoke, flooding, earthquakes and eschatological motifs, transformations in nature, the man on the beast that will roam the earth (the Antichrist), etc. give both a concreteness to Boularwah’s vision of the disorder of Constantine and a religious authority to his sanctimonious reactions to it.* Through them he rationalises a world no longer under his control, slipping away from him as fast as is his own sanity. It is a world wedged between two realities, two pasts and two futures.

The ambivalence of Sheikh Abdelmajid Boularwah’s ‘world upside down’ allows for variations in reading this novel, particularly from our vantage point of hindsight. In Todorov’s terminology,† the signification of the text allows us to get a glimpse of the Constantine (of Algeria) of the early 1970s and we may even correctly guess Tahir Wattar’s political affiliations and aspirations. But it is its symbolisation, the bite of his irony, the focus of his parody and the vividness of his images of inversion that ‘permit those satisfied with the existing or traditional social order to see the theme as a mockery of the idea of changing that order around, and at the same time, those dissatisfied with that order to see the theme as mocking it in its present, perverted state’.* The recurrence of apocalyptic themes and imagery provides the novel with a rhythm and resonance that give a psychological coherence to the actions of the novel and, at the same time, help to transmit its political messages and define its aesthetic distances.

Algeria of the 1970s was a vast historical and geographic crossroads. It lay between colonialism and independence, French and Arabic, Europe and the Arab world, Islam and socialism; it stood between a hard-fought struggle for self-determination and an uncertain future of battling ideologies, between hope and despair, sanity and insanity. Sheikh Boularwah’s odyssey takes us from past to present, from stoic reality to surrealism, from one opposite, one extreme, to the other. Wattar’s novel is an indictment, an auto-da-fé, against the old guard, the old institutions and the forces of recidivism. But do the powers of modernity, the new order, the new regime, fare much better?

Algeria of the 1990s has taken an unexpected turn, torn apart once again into two pasts, two futures, two visions in conflict. Its political and social situation clearly resonates an apocalyptic legend in which the Prophet Muhammad describes the signs of the end of the world:

When the spoils of war [the state treasury] is not divided lawfully; when Islam is embraced for profit; when alms are given grudgingly; when men obey their wives but disobey their mothers; when people are kind to their friends but ignore their fathers; when voices are raised in the mosques; when the leader of the people hails from its lowest ranks; when a man is honoured out of fear of his evil deeds; when wine is consumed and silk is worn; when singing girls and musical instruments abound; when the young generations curse fathers and grandfathers; then they can expect a violent wind, a black sky, or a great shake-up of the earth.*

The excitement of Tahir Wattar’s The Earthquake lies in his ability to expand the boundaries of these legends and rework them into a new Arabic literature and its political and social contexts and